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Review

Vitamin D in Health and Disease – An Update

1, 2, 3★★ Corresponding author

  1. 1Department of Pharmacology, Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College and Hospital, Puducherry, INDIA.
  2. 2Department of Clinical Pharmacology, JIPMER, Puducherry, INDIA.
  3. 3Department of Endocrinology, JIPMER, Puducherry, INDIA.

CORRESPONDENCE

Sadishkumar Kamalanathan

Department of Endocrinology, JIPMER, Puducherry, INDIA.

sadishkk@gmail.com

Received: 04-07-2018; Revised: 11-07-2018; Accepted: 06-09-2018.

Volume 10, Issue 4 · pp. 381-387 · 2018 · DOI: 10.5530/jyp.2018.10.85

ABSTRACT

The importance of vitamin D in health and disease is being increasingly recognized nowadays and lots of research is being carried out in this area. Thus, it is essential to understand about this vitamin and this narrative review is one such initiative. The main aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth knowledge of the role of vitamin D in health and disease. A comprehensive literature search was carried out in the search portals of PubMed, Google Scholar and Indmed to identify the role of vitamin D in health and disease. Vitamin D is a fat soluble prohormone, synthesized in our epidermal cells following exposure to sunlight. The synthesized precursors of vitamin D are metabolically activated by 25-hydroxylation in the liver and 1-α hydroxylation in the kidney. The biologically active form of vitamin D is 1, 25-dihydroxycholecalciferol which binds to the vitamin D receptor to mediate its effects. Vitamin D plays a key role in maintaining calcium and phosphate homeostasis in the body. However, vitamin D is also found to have various pleiotropic effects like anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, antifibrotic and immunomodulatory effects. The serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are considered as indicator of body’s vitamin D stores. Deficiency of vitamin D is highly prevalent and is associated with various diseases like osteoporosis, hip fractures, myocardial infarction and malignancies of colon, breast and prostate.

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    Anandabaskar, N., Selvarajan, S., & Kamalanathan, S. (2018). Vitamin D in Health and Disease – An Update. Journal of Young Pharmacists, 10(4), 381-387. https://doi.org/10.5530/jyp.2018.10.85

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    © 2018 Author(s)

    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0